Minjee Kim
Personal Statement:
I first got drawn into the ways in which real estate development affects urban planning and vice versa when I started working at the City of Cambridge’s Community Development Department in Massachusetts. Conflicts of interests around land development, especially when the scale is large, were intense, real, and seemingly irreconcilable, and more often than not, for-profit real estate development was considered to be antithetical to progressive planning values. My work in response focuses on identifying how planners and policymakers can harness the forces of real estate development to further progressive planning values while making sure that cities get their fair share of benefits from the development activities. My dissertation identified and analyzed how major U.S. cities have been frequently negotiating zoning to create and capture value from real estate developments and the policies and conditions under which planners can promote better planning outcomes for those negotiated developments.
Education:
Bachelor of Architecture: Yonsei University. 2011. Architectural Design
Masters: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2013. Master in Urban Planning
PhD: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2019. Urban and Regional Planning
Research Activites:
Large-scale land developments
Value capture
Land use and zoning
Socially-responsible real estate development
Opportunity Zones
Selected Publications:
Minjee Kim. (2020). “Negotiation or schedule-based? Examining the strengths and weaknesses of the public benefit exaction strategies of Boston and Seattle.” Journal of the American Planning Association.
https://doi.org/10.1080/01944363.2019.1691040
Minjee Kim. (2020). “Upzoning and Value Capture: How U.S. local governments use land use regulation power to create and capture value from real estate developments.” Land Use Policy.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2020.104624
Minjee Kim. (Under review, 2020). “How do tax-based revitalization policies affect urban property development? Evidence from Bronzeville, Chicago.”
Minjee Kim and Tingyu Zhou. (Under review, 2020). “Does Restricting the Entry of Formula Businesses Help Mom-and-pop Stores? The Case of American Towns with Unique Community Character.”
Minjee Kim, Emil Malizia, Marla Nelson, Laura Wolf-Powers, Joanna Ganning, and Greg Schrock (Under revision, 2020). “Real Estate Development and Economic Development Planning Education: Pragmatic Turn or Trojan Horse?”
Minjee Kim. (2019). “Adventures in the Land of OZ.” Planning Magazine. American Planning Association.
Hee-jin Yang, Minjee Kim, and Mack-Joong Choi. (2015). “Regulating Chain Stores to Protect Local Businesses: A Comparative Case Study of the Legislative Frameworks in the U.S. and Korea.” Journal of the Korean Urban Management Association 28 (2): 127-144
Work in Progress
Minjee Kim and Bill Swiatek. “Policy design matters for equitable place-based economic development: the case of Opportunity Zones.”Minjee Kim. “Taking Stock of What We Know About Large-scale Development Initiatives: A Review and Research Agenda.”
Minjee Kim. “Politics of Negotiated Developments: when does public participation matter in negotiated development deals?”